Name: What Inside an Average Japanese Family's Home is like New Year's Holiday
Uploaded: 2020-03-19T18:41:20.000Z
Duration: 14 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In this video I'm gonna show you what a New Year's holiday is like in the home of a Japanese family

Adverbs of degree

During the New Year's holiday Japanese families usually gather in spent time together just like the Christmas holidays in Western countries

So for this New Year's holiday, Maiko and I decided to spend time with her family

So we're in Maiko's hometown Aichi which is about three hours of south of Tokyo

And this house behind me is a house that she actually grew up in and since I'm already here for the holidays

I wanted to take this opportunity to show you guys what it's like inside

Their home, how they spend the Japanese holidays, what they eat, what they do

Hopefully we make it to the shrine and maybe a little bit of the house itself and today is December 31st

New Year's Eve day. It's about 10 o'clock right now, but let's start this video in the morning

All right, that feels a little bit better. I got my coffee now. It's still 7:30 everyone is still asleep

Just got to wait for everyone to wake up now, Check some email

We're actually in her old brother's room right now. I don't know if you guys can see this, Maiko was still in the bed

She had a long night. Time to take a shower

Right so not a lot of stuff is happening this morning. Dad went back to sleep

Let me just show you around the house while we have some time because we're not really doing so much what right now

I guess this is like part of the day not a lot happens

Countryside/ Two stories, three bedrooms, living, dining, and kitchen and even a cool Tatami room with a personal shrine

All right so this right behind me is their backyard as you can see, it's actually quite bigger

Then you would expect specially when comparing it to Tokyo

At the front of the house there's usually a family name tag like this and this laced rope like decoration is called Shimenawa

It's a special decoration for the new year. It's supposed to exorcise bad fortunes in Maiko's parents house. It's everywhere, in the kitchen, bathroom

Etc. And at the main entrance, there's a Shochikubai Banzai, which is also a New Year's decoration

Shochikubai means pine, bamboo, and plum tree. Pine and bamboo stay green all year round and plum trees bloom beautifully in winter

So it symbolizes remaining faithful and a healthy long life

It's got a typical stainless sink, built-in gas stove with three burners, and a small fish grill. Dishwasher, family size refrigerator

Oven, microwave, rice cooker, and a toaster. This is the Kamidana Shinto altar

The miniature shrine can be found in many Japanese households, shops, and sometimes offices for daily worship since it's a New Year's chimney

Shimenawa and Saki is added as offerings and Maiko's dad placed a big jumbo lottery ticket here

How cool would that be if they won? All right, so this is the second floor toilet. It's actually quite interesting

Just the way they save water and space at once. I really want to show you

This is Maiko's sister's room right here. And this is the toilet right here, and you can see there's actually not a lot of space

So you can see right behind me. This is the entire toilet bathroom space. Like right here is the door

So if you were to sit down in this like my knees are pretty much hitting the door

But this is common for a secondary toilet in Japan. The main downstairs toilet is much larger and has a separate sink area

Just wanted to show you how space efficient homes are in Japan

But what's interesting about this toilet is that you've probably seen in my other video the actual sink is built into the toilet

So what happens is when you flush the toilet the water comes down into here

You can wash your hands and then that water is used to fill up the toilet

It's actually a pretty cool way to save water and it also saves space because there's actually not a lot of room

To put another sink in here and obviously it has this bidet control so you have all that functionality

One thing you find on a Japanese home is that people love to watch TV and just sit around all day

Especially on days like this when no one has work or they just like sit around and watch TV and

Japanese TV is probably like the most interesting

during the New Year's holiday because they know people are gonna be sitting at home doing nothing and just

Relaxing and having a good time with your family

And so the program it's actually pretty good. The one time that I do watch TV

Japanese TV is like this time because they have really interesting programming

So Maiko's younger sister needs to be dropped off at the station. She's actually spending New Year's with her friends in Kyoto

So just dropped her off at the train station and now we're going to the supermarket to pick up some food. It's actually quite late

So I think you might just have lunch there or somewhere

Not very traditional in my eyes but apparently like us is that Japanese people don't celebrate at lunch in the New Year's, right?

Cause you- (Maiko)There's nothing to celebrate for lunch.

This place is just as so busy right now. Hopefully here shopping done with work quickly go back home

The supermarket is filled with people. In fact, I've been to this market before but it was never anything like this

So we've been waiting in line forever, the lines are so long on New Year's Day

Reminder to get your stuff before New Year's Day. Otherwise, we'll be waiting

All that wait for a self checkout line to scan your items and go. Is it this convenient in your country?

We're just gonna relax for a little bit and I think we're gonna start cooking. We means my mom

Well, we already has a lot of stuff cooked and in my family we don't serve drinking early or anything

So one thing I learned about the supermarket just now

I actually offered, told Maiko that we should pay for the groceries

But Maiko told me that that if we did it be very rude to pay for the groceries

Because we are the guests in the house even though I wanted to help out

I guess you really aren't supposed to help out in the situation

Maiko- I know but if you're like offering the support in a financial that means you are showing that oh

Paolo- it's weird because I think in my family if I were to

Come home and help pay for groceries and actually be happy.

Accept like like if someone has more money than you it's not like, oh they're better than you just like. Oh, okay. Cool

How about you guys? What's your culture? Like is it okay to pay is it not? I'm not quite sure

Let me know in the comments. So here's the problem today since I woke up so early. I'm gonna be super tired

So I'm trying to figure out when to take a nap

We're supposed to have dinner at around 6:00 6:45, and we leave here at 11:30. So maybe after dinner. I'll go and take a nap

But the problem with that is you don't want to like take a nap right after you eat, right?

We just got back from shopping and it sounds Maiko's sister's gone for the rest of the trip

You think about like during the Christmas holidays like family everyone comes home and you're supposed to have a

reconnection of people getting together but this time around it's like

brothers gone, Maiko's sister's gone and it's just us four but I guess that's like

Right and a lot of families not everyone comes home or everyone like starts getting older and they have different plans

So anyways, we'll just continue on. Okay. So Maiko's just turning on TV and watching TV now. This is like a constant theme